Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Learning To Talk Again

The pressure to find solutions for people in pain is
powerful. A friend comes to you with a
need or an emergency in a relationship and you feel put on the spot to come up
with a piece of advice that will help ‘solve the situation.’ The pressure is
even more powerful if you are a Christian talking with another Christian about
the stresses and strains in life. We
have created an atmosphere of therapeutic solution finding that has put all of
us in a bind.

Crabb believes we are missing the boat entirely. He is not against finding solutions as such,
but he is clear that we miss the mark more often than not in that we simply do
not know how to talk with each other out of the depths of what God is doing in
each of us. We like to talk across the
surface of things. It is just easier to
do that. We feel the urge to jump into a
conversation and offer some soothing piece of comfort, offer accountability, or
the magic pill that will offer the solution to a deeply complicated problem.

So instead of talking out of our own wit, wisdom, or
fear, Crabb offers a new way of looking at relationships and life – SoulTalk. SoulTalk is his way of leading us into a
conversation where God is at the center of every life and every relationship in
every situation. He argues that we do
not really know how to talk this way and his book offers a series of steps that
help us break bad, religious habits and enter into God’s way of working in
people’s lives.

I found Crabb’s formulation of SoulTalk to be deeply
freeing and rightly prioritized. In my
role as a pastor I am often with people who find themselves in over their
heads, or who have finally decided to talk about God when life falls apart, and
the unspoken expectation is that a conversation or two might just do the trick. His advice is to stop talking and start
learning how to listen to what the Spirit is doing and wants to do in an
individual’s life. The primary goal in
each SoulTalk conversation is not empathy or solution-finding, but Spirit-finding.

Along the way he has a lot of things to say about the
place of God in the Christian’s life that simply need to be heard in a
Christian culture where we have exchanged Christ’s life for an expectation of
blessing and prosperity. What would
happen if intimacy with God for Christ’s sake were more important to us than
the cure to our cancer or the ‘fixing’ of a deeply hurting situation? According to Crabb, when we put these kinds
of things first, we find the greatest thing possible, and God begins to do the
work in our souls that is needed.

I highly recommend this book for any believer interested
in deepening their discipleship, understanding how to relate with others in
Christ, and how to learn to listen to the Spirit in all things.